Premium real estate email newsletters

Here at Tools For Real Estate it has been a few years since we rolled out a redesign of our email newsletters, so I’m excited to tell you about the improvements for 2015. Our goal is always to stay current with the needs of your readers while keeping a clean, beautiful email newsletter format. With so many people now reading email on smartphones and tablets, it was time to make sure we were using the best in responsive, mobile-friendly e-newsletter design, and we took the opportunity to make the overall format more appealing on all devices.

Here’s an example of the OLD version on a smartphone:

Here’s a screenshot of the NEW header section as seen on smartphones:

And just below the header section in the NEW version:

The main article sections are also much more mobile-friendly with the new design.

Here’s an example of the OLD version on a smartphone:

And here’s what an article section looks like on a smartphone in the NEW version:

A Few Other Things

We’ve also spruced up the overall look for a cleaner, more modern design. If you look through the real estate email newsletter samples on our website you’ll notice that there are fewer calls to action, but the ones that are there are more noticeable than before. (The goal is to be effective, not overwhelming.) The end result is a real estate email newsletter that’s professional and friendly without being “salesy”.

And, of course, our new email newsletter design still looks great on regular desktop and laptop displays:

Have you set your real estate business goals for 2013? Whether you already have or they’re still in the works, I highly recommend taking a few moments to watch this video of Zig Ziglar explaining how to set goals in a way that helps you successfully achieve them. I’ve seen it a few times before, but I always find his advice really insightful – it falls into the category of things that intuitively make sense when you hear them but that are quite easy to forget when you’re bouncing around in the day-to-day world.

Some great Zig Ziglar quotes from the video:

“The basic problem is not lack of time, it’s lack of direction.”

“Don’t confuse activity with accomplishment.”

“Logic will not change an emotion, but action will.”

And from J.C. Penney:

“Give me a stock clerk with a goal and I’ll give you a man who will make history. But give me a man without a goal, and I’ll give you a stock clerk.”

Click the link above to watch the video on Youtube (be sure to start with Part 1).

Please forgive the question. (And if your first reaction is “Of course not, what is she thinking!” I totally understand.) However, you would not believe the number of times I’ve seen real estate agents copy and paste entire news articles into their blog posts, mistakenly believing that they’re complying with copyright law by including the source and the author byline.

While this might seem entirely fair (after all, it’s clear that they didn’t actually write it, and the original source is noted), according to the law it is not. The finer points of what complies with copyright law blend into a grey area, but there are some very clear standards that anyone who uses current material as a research base for their own writing should know about.

Here’s a great summary on copyright law from the legal site Nolo.com. Halfway down the page you’ll find the five guidelines explaining what constitutes “Fair Use.”

Seeing as I use information from a large number of sources as the basis for an original article in the real estate email newsletter Tools For Real Estate provides each month, I’m very aware of how important it is to treat your research bases carefully. A good way to track things is to create a Word document that’s just for the topic you’re writing about, and paste into it entire articles along with their associated link. This helps you by keeping the information consolidated and by keeping the exact wording in front of you, so that you don’t mistakenly parrot the language or lean too much on material from any specific article. It also serves as proof that anything you wrote was the result of substantial research based on a number of sources.

Typically, by the time I’m done with an article I have a Word document of base material that’s between 20 and 30 pages long. This would be overkill for a typical blog post because they take much less time to write, but you get the picture. Keep track of your sources, and learn to know and love the “Fair Use” guidelines.

For years when I saw that someone was a bonded General Contractor, I assumed that they had passed a set of construction-related professional standards set by the state I think many consumers make the same assumption, but did you know that depending on where you live, this could be completely untrue?

In Washington state, for example, there are NO professional expertise-related requirements for someone to register as a General Contractor. They do have to meet certain business and residency requirements, have liability insurance, and post a bond of $12,000 (as of December 2012), but here’s what the state of Washington says about the professional qualification part:

Washington state General Contractor professional requirements as of December 2012.

Requirements vary widely from state to state. California, for example, requires four years of experience, or some equivalent combination of technical education and work history.

Since being able to recommend trustworthy service providers is a valuable part of what a real estate agent brings to the table, it makes sense to be aware of contractor requirements in your state. Here’s a link to a Contractor’s License Reference Site – you can click on the map to go to the database with information about contractor requirements in your state.

I got off the phone with a Hostgator tech support person a few days ago and vowed to write a post reminding real estate agents of why we recommend them for real estate website hosting.

Finding a place to host your real estate website or blog is one of the first things you’re confronted with as a new agent, or at least as soon as you’ve decided to get a serious online presence (for many agents that second part comes later on, but it shouldn’t). After trying three other web hosting providers, here’s why we recommend Hostgator for real estate agents:

Good uptime and industry leader: Hostgator has been around since 2002 and has a 99.9% uptime guarantee.

24/7 customer support, including by phone: The phone support option is huge for real estate agents – I just don’t recommend using a web hosting provider that relies only on email or chat. I know that might sound funny from someone who runs an online-based marketing service, but even being more techie than the average real estate professional, if one of my sites is down I want to hear the warm breath of an actual mammal on the other end of the phone as soon as possible.

Hostgator has good phone support etiquette: Twice in the past two weeks I’ve had long calls with support as they investigated an issue (this is not typical, by the way, and one of these issues was due to a mistake on my part). Both times I noticed that when you’re on hold they check back with you every couple of minutes, without fail. There must be some kind of timer that notifies them to check in after a set period of time so that you never feel abandoned.

The support techs are helpful and don’t make you feel stupid: Even though I’m pretty techie and can hold my own with some of the web-spiel, there have been times with other companies when I felt like the support department was sure I was a doofus. (Numerous studies have concluded that this is not the case, I am happy to report.) The Hostgator reps have always been polite and dedicated to resolving the issue I was calling about.

Hostgator has reasonable pricing: This is not the most important criterion, since we all know that cheaper is not always better, but it’s nice that their pricing is very reasonable.

If you have any questions about real estate website hosting, drop us a line or leave a comment below. And here’s the standard affiliate link disclosure:

Just so you know, the link(s) to any companies on this page may be our affiliate link, meaning we get a small share of any purchase price if you buy from them. We think of it as a way for people to say “thank you” for our resources and the time we’ve spent with our toes curled into fists of frustration with the wrong providers, but if you prefer to not use our affiliate link you can always Google the company name and go directly to their site. It’s all good!

As you start ramping up your real estate marketing now that 2012 is here, you might want to check out the House of Magnets website for ideas to complement your other projects. They offer a good selection of magnets in the form of calendars, sport schedules, business card holders, and more – and their prices and order quantities are very reasonable. Their turnaround time appears to be pretty fast, and you can even have something created with your own custom design if you’re feeling artsy.

I always advise agents to use more than one marketing mode in order to reach all of their clients, and those different tools can build upon each other as well. Here at Tools For Real Estate we find that the agents using our real estate email newsletter service who have the best email open rates are often the ones who touch base with their clients in other ways as well, whether it’s through an occasional phone call or by supplementing with a gift like the magnets we’re mentioning here.

By the way, we’re not an affiliate of House of Magnets, just a fan based on what we know about them so far. We’d love to hear your feedback if you end up using them.

If you’re a real estate agent who sends regular marketing pieces to your past clients, contacts, and/or a farm, you might be surprised to know what your potential future real estate clients are thinking about towards the end of the year. (I’m talking right now primarily about home buyers, but of course their mindset affects future sellers as well.)

Conventional wisdom has it that in December people are busy with holiday preparations and travel plans, and therefore probably aren’t likely to turn their minds to real estate until well into the New Year. But check out today’s graph (12/3/11) from Google Trends:

From Dec. 3, 2011. Click image for current search results on Google Trends.

This shows the search activity in North America on Google for specific search terms related to home buying. As you can see from previous years, there’s always a dramatic jump in activity late in the year, but look at the volume so far this December! It’s interesting that the term “home buying” hasn’t followed the trend (yet, anyway).

So, should you concentrate on marketing to home buyers late in the year? In my opinion the answer is “yes,” since ultimately as real estate agents the goal is to provide people with useful information that will help them accomplish what they’re trying to do, and the graph tells us that right now there’s a surge of people thinking about buying homes. As always, just keep things in perspective, and remember that you’re marketing during a season that is focused on something far more important.

(Either way, the current graph implies that early January would be a great time to go all-out.)

Here’s a handy tool you can use when you’re calculating deadlines in your real estate transactions. It’s TimeandDate.com’s date calculator, which allows you to enter in a date, then choose a number of days, weeks, or months to add in order to come up with a final date. Here’s an example of what it looks like:

They also have a tool for determining the number of days between two dates – click here for that calculator, or on the image above for the future date calculator.

(Of course, keep in mind that ultimately you’re responsible for determining timelines correctly, regardless of what the calculator comes up with. :))

Do you sometimes lose track of when the various housing and economic reports are coming out? It’s easy to do, but since newspapers start buzzing as soon as the Case-Shiller housing numbers or new unemployment figures are released, it’s good to know in advance what’s coming up. That’s where MarketWatch.com’s economic calendar page comes in handy. It shows you the time and date of each upcoming economic report release, and provides the previous report’s data for comparison. For example, coming up this week are the Cash-Shiller home price report for January, pending home sales data, and the unemployment rate for March 2011 – all numbers that are likely to affect the real estate market.

In the course of researching this month’s real estate email newsletter article I stumbled upon Diana Olick’s Realty Check column on the CNBC site, and I have to say I wish I’d found it long ago. Each weekday she posts a short, well-researched blurb about some current real estate topic, from recently released housing reports to new legislation, and I found it to be an excellent source of up-to-the-minute real estate information.

One of the things I like about her writing is that she appears to have good insight into the issues and I think she tries to take a fair approach – she’s not out to spin the pros of real estate and at the same time she’s not someone who despises agents either – refreshing. (I get so annoyed with people who act like they’re breaking barriers in the field of honesty, but if you read their stuff it turns out they’re as hopelessly biased as some of the industry ‘shills’ that they can’t stand.)

Anyway, are you tuning into something daily that keeps you on the frontlines of information that your clients may need you to know? I understand that checking a bunch of blogs every morning can become onerous, but this is one little column that will take you about 90 seconds to read and will almost always impart something worth knowing. I highly recommend that you give it a whirl.